Buried the Ashes of Someone, Broken by the Strain
by GailTheFish
Summary: Post-Drought Conditions but references to moments across the series, and before, prior to the episode. Taken from the Tumblr prompt "healing". Title is from Feeling a Moment by Feeder. CJ/Toby


You've never known Toby to cry, not in front of you anyway.

When his mother died, you talked with him for hours on the phone and even with the miles between you and the fact you couldn't be there with him, his jaded, cracked voice told you everything.

So now here you are in his apartment, the tea you made him is abandoned on the table. He's sobbing silently at the other end of the couch and it isn't until you sniff that you realise you're crying too. It breaks you. You want to touch him, make sure he's still there.

This is how it always is: a slight crack, a break in the system, you're there for each other. You may not know it at the time, or even later, but it's an automatic thing carved somewhere deep in your dynamic. But you never thought you'd have to console him over his brother's suicide. The brother who welcomed you into his home three Thanksgivings in a row in the eighties and whose wedding you attended even though Toby was engaged to Andi by then.

In the silence, you think back to when Andi left him. He drank himself to sleep and you were the one who had to deal with his embarrassment and his hangover and getting his life back on track all in one swift morning before Leo could smell the scotch in his pores. You're his fixer, and he's yours, so you didn't even mind when he dragged you in the shower you forced him to take.

After Rosslyn, it was a quick fuck in the hospital parking lot. You were probably still slightly concussed but he'd just witnessed one of your best friends bleeding on the ground and he wasn't going to let another life slip through his fingers if he could help it. You never knew you could bend that way in the backseat of a car. So he held onto your hips a little too tightly and you bit down on his shoulder when you came, but the blood drawn stood to remind you both you were still alive, still breathing. It soothed something.

It soothed the nightmares you both had but never admitted to that summer, including the one where you found him lying stone cold dead on the pavement and screamed so loudly that he rolled off the bed in fright when you woke him up.

Mrs Landingham's death reminded you both of your own mothers' deaths, and he didn't mind when you stained the pillow with your mascara tears. He just held you closer in his arms, and mumbled softly in your hair, and it was almost as if the entire administration hadn't been shifted on its axis and you were going to pick up the pieces.

When you couldn't do that, when you tried to resign, it seemed like nothing could be healed. You yelled at him when he tried to talk you out of it, it was too much a mouthpiece for everything you knew the others couldn't say. So you tried to fuck it out of your system again. It was on your terms and the alcohol had already numbed you so it was cathartic, in its own way. No-one else would have let you use them like that. He stands grounded to your battles, concrete that somehow is flexible. It sounds like something from a badly animated cartoon you watched as a kid in Ohio.

Simon had put an end to everything you had built up that year: you had healed each other in a way foreign to you in this century. A relationship had blossomed beneath the surface from those nights in Manchester becoming a regular occurrence but you weren't going to have him protect you for this. He'd never been your knight in shining armour. So Simon's death crushed you, but he fell back into step anyway. It took a week for you to let anyone into your apartment, but he was the first one to use his key, and you never told him you were glad for it. He read you poetry from the book he had stashed in one of your drawers and stroked your hair when you fell asleep on the couch. He was there when you woke up in the middle of the night, another nightmare of another scenario. It was like Rosslyn all over again. But this time he didn't fuck you to make it all better, because it would be unkind. You introduced him to tea instead and didn't even realise he was getting what you wouldn't give him elsewhere. With Andi.

That healing took a lot longer, because it wasn't just twins in the equation. It was fresh betrayal and lies and everything you lost before you went to LA because who knew condoms could split so easily? And who knew being rear-ended on the highway could be so fatal? And who would've thought there was darkness still between you that never spoke it s name? Josh healed you that time, almost like a counsellor, but once you got shot at again, he was right back there with you. Toby would never stray too far, so she'd learned over the years. And that sex was healing after he teased you mercilessly for trying to tell him you balanced the egg.

When Andi was in Gaza, you were too scared to heal him because that was territory you never bordered on. It was a complicated love they shared, not too different from yours, but Andi never came over your threshold and nor did you with hers. So you let it slide that he slept with her the night she got back, to taste her skin under his tongue and know she was still hot-blooded. His wounds were patched back up for the next time.

"CJ?" his voice startles you, and you wonder if he tried speaking to you already.

"Yeah?" you reply tenderly.

"Come to bed?"

"Let me wash the cut, it'll get infected."

Physical wounds aren't usually your forte. He helped you when you broke your leg one summer and when you cut your hand on the glass after someone's bar fight, but he was a surprisingly strong form for someone who broke so easily on the inside.

He groaned, almost back to his typical disposition, and you moved back closer to him, cupping his face.

His eyes were flat but glistened when you stroked the cut with your thumb and kissed it, "Come on."

Sighing, you both stood and you sat him on the edge of the toilet seat to clean his face. He pulled you onto his lap at one point and held you perversely as if you were going to run away.

"It's fine," he said shakily into your neck.

"Fine," you contended, because you were tired and craved his touch.

So you took him to bed and made sweet cathartic love and kissed away the tear that spilled onto your cheek when you gasped out his name. Toby had barely pulled out by the time he was asleep and you drew your arms around his middle. His heated back against your cheek, dark curls tickling your forehead and a soft kiss to his shoulder.

It was a step. He was going to take a lot longer to heal this time, but you knew the ropes and they swung into your tune. You could help him find his way on this dark path neither one had taken but trusted each other to follow them down anyway. It was your turn, and as you clung to him in your sleep, you clung to him with this knowledge engraved in the space between your hearts.


End file.
